Unanswered questions (General)

by George Jelliss , Crewe, Wednesday, April 01, 2009, 14:03 (5497 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I'm sure you will have realized yourself that this response comes very close to David Turell's panentheism ... we all acknowledge there is some sort of incomprehensible force at work. - I don't acknowledge there is some sort of "incomprehensible force" at work. Nature to my way of thinking is quite simple and thus comprehensible. I also don't see it as a "force", but simply subject to necessity. Since DT supports intelligent design I presume his "panentheos" must have intelligence capable of making designs. - dhw: my question relates to what religions have in common: most have at their centre the incomprehensible force which we all acknowledge and which somehow brought us into existence. - Respectfully, No! Also I increasingly suspect that "nonexistence" is a meaningless concept with regard to the universe. The forces that brought life into existence from non-life can only be those known to physics and chemistry, although the precise sequence of events is not yet known. - dhw: The superorganism I had in mind was the universe, or Nature. There seem to be so many interconnections on the macrocosmic as well as the microcosmic level that it's an image I'm reluctant to dismiss. - What are these connections you refer to? Apart from the fact that the whole universe obeys the same laws of physics (which is partly a philosophical assumption to simplify our study of the subject) there are in fact very few actual connections or interactions between distant parts of the universe. Certainly not enough to make it an "organism" of some sort. Beyond the event horizon there is in fact no interaction at all possible, and this will be more so as the universe expands even faster.

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GPJ